Shadow Restaurants Boost Revenue

A story about a startup that helped local restaurants create shadow brands on delivery platforms to increase their revenue.

"I looked at this startup that was doing exactly this - they would go to a local mom and pop restaurant, like Chinese food, and say 'Great, Mr. Han's Chinese, everybody loves you locally and now you're on DoorDash, but your photos are kind of crap, your descriptions are off, you're not saying what foods are vegan even though they are.'

What he would do is partner with the restaurant and create a shadow brand - like a clone of the brand but call it something catchier like 'Choo Choo Chinese.' All the photos would be super bright on a backdrop of orange or red, really good looking photos. He'd trim the menu down to just the most popular items, write better copy, take better photos.

When an order gets placed on those restaurants, that same restaurant just gets a ticket - they don't even know it's from this other brand. Later they would send them packaging that's like 'if it comes in through this ticket printer, put it in the Choo Choo Chinese box, don't put it in Mr. Han's local box.'

He's like 'Yeah, we have 200 restaurants, we do like $17 million in GMV and we operate none of these restaurants. They were already restaurants that existed - all we did was rebrand them for Postmates and Uber Eats and DoorDash.' They love it because they get like 30% extra revenue just because we're better at marketing on those platforms than they are."